Trade treaties have introduced the principle that similar risks should be treated similarly, and that countries must achieve internal consistency in the levels of protection they afford against certain hazards within their territories. The problem is that there is no agreement on when risks are "similar" or when levels of protection are "consistent." The danger is that in resolving these issues, international trade institutions will infringe on the political sovereignty of their Members. This Article proposes a science-based solution.

I. Introduction

There is a crucial, although implicit, empirical assumption in the debate about federal judicial review under the affirmative U.S. Commerce Clause.

According to well-settled legal principles and policies, criminal prosecution under our federal environmental laws traditionally was reserved for the most egregious and flagrant offenses, i.e., for those alleged offenses that constituted willful or knowing violations of the law or demonstrated reckless disregard for the law.

Citizens, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), universities, and other members of civil society have played an essential role in developing and implementing environmental and natural resource laws and institutions at the local and national levels over the past decades. This role has extended more recently into the international arena.¹ This Article examines the emerging norms and practices that guarantee transparency, public participation, and accountability in the management of international watercourses.

On June 18, 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court decided United States v. Mead Corp.,¹ the third time in the last two years that the Court has directly addressed the question of when the deference authorized by Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.² applies to federal agency decisions.³ Dissenting, Justice Antonin Scalia said of the majority's opinion: "Its consequences will be enormous, and almost uniformly bad."⁴

Adaptive management represents the future of natural resource management, including that of water and aquatic resources. Adaptive management is an inherently flexible system, in which resource managers establish desired outcomes, develop hypotheses and monitoring programs to test whether existing management approaches are achieving those outcomes, and then alter the approaches depending on the monitoring results.

One of the major news stories of this year is the implosion of California's electric power restructuring. The most capital-intensive industry in the United States, in the largest state in the Union, which itself is one of the largest economies in the world, came completely unglued. This focused attention on how we produce, distribute, and consume electric power and its profound implications, not only for social welfare, but for the environment.¹

One of the sacred canons of the antiglobalization movement is that globalization of trade is bad for the environment. Free-trade enthusiasts, on the other hand, would have us believe that free markets promote wealth (probably true) and that wealth is good for the environment (possibly true, at least some of the time). The truth is probably somewhat more complex.

Imagine a world in which the ordinary effect of human activity—particularly activity that contributes to economic growth and social development—also protects and restores the environment. Imagine, too, a world in which large scale poverty has been eliminated.¹ This may sound like pie in the sky, but it is emphatically not. Indeed, if we do not make a transition toward this world within the next 50 years, the future will be painful and costly for both humans and the environment.² Making the transition is possible, but it will not be easy.